Nanotech discovery may green chemical manufacturing

News

A new nanotech catalyst developed by McGill University Chemists
Chao-Jun Li, Audrey Moores and their colleagues offers industry an
opportunity to reduce the use of expensive and toxic heavy metals.
Catalysts are substances used to facilitate and drive chemical
reactions. Although chemists have long been aware of the ecological
and economic impact of traditional chemical catalysts and do
attempt to reuse their materials, it is generally difficult to
separate the catalyzing chemicals from the finished product. The
team’s discovery does away with this chemical process
altogether.

Li neatly describes the new catalyst as “use a magnet and pull them
out!” The technology is known as nanomagnetics and involves
nanoparticles of a simple iron magnet. Nanoparticles are sized
between 1 and 100 nanometres (a strand of hair is about 80,000
nanometres wide). The catalyst itself is chemically benign and can
be efficiently recycled. In terms of practical applications, their
method can already be used to generate the reactions that are
required for example in pharmaceutical research, and could in the
future be used to achieve reactions necessary for research in other
industries and fields.

The discovery was published in Highlights in Chemical Science on
January 18, 2010. Li is known as one of the world leading pioneers
in green chemistry, an entirely new approach to the science that
tries to avoid the use of toxic, petrochemical-based solvents in
favour of basic substances.